The Swap(75)

I nodded slightly, but I was too overcome to speak.

“I called my lawyer in the city about custody. Freya named me as the baby’s father, so my attorney said a formal adoption will be the easiest. The paperwork shouldn’t take too long.”

He set down the car seat and knelt to peer in at Maggie. “Have a good life, little one.” He stroked her soft cheek with his big fingers.

Maggie gurgled and smiled at him. My heart twisted in my chest.

“She’ll be happy here,” Max said to us. “This is right.” Without looking back, he left.

? ? ?

That’s how Maggie became ours. It was an adjustment, at first, but we joyfully made it. I cared for her in the mornings while Brian wrote. When I opened the store at ten, he took over the childcare duties. At noon, after she had her lunch, Brian brought Maggie to the store, where she napped in the back room. I’d found a new assistant—a lovely senior named Joyce, who was more than capable of managing customers while I tended to my daughter’s needs. At the end of my shift, I took Maggie home for dinner, a bath, and bed. I was exhausted but happy. The baby was happy, too. She never made strange with us; she never seemed to miss Freya and Max. It was like she, too, knew this was where she belonged.

Two weeks after we became parents, a manila envelope arrived at Hawking Mercantile. I barely glanced at the unfamiliar return address; I knew it was from Max’s lawyers. These would be the documents required to make our parenthood official. Excitedly, I slid my thumb under the sealed flap and pulled out the pages. But they weren’t custody papers. They were the results of Maggie’s paternity test.

We didn’t need them now. Maggie was our child and biology was irrelevant. And Brian wouldn’t thank me for going behind his back, for ignoring his advice. I would destroy the report, put it through a shredder or toss it in the fire. But first . . . I had to look.

It stated, unequivocally, that Maggie was not Brian’s child.

I sat down heavily on the stool behind the till. Maggie was Max’s daughter. Freya had been fighting to keep her child from us because we had no claim to her. But Freya had lied about the date of conception. Faked the ultrasound images. Perhaps she’d been unsure of her daughter’s paternity, too. But now, I knew the truth. As I slipped the papers back into the envelope, I wondered if Freya had had other lovers I didn’t know about. But no . . . we had been friends when Maggie was conceived. I would have known if she had been sleeping with other men.

Joyce must have noticed my shock, because she asked, “Are you okay?”

I forced a smile. “I’m fine.”

And I was fine. This didn’t matter. This didn’t change anything. The adoption papers would arrive soon, and Maggie would be legally ours. One day, she would want to know about her birth parents, might want to test her DNA. One day, we would bring Max back into his daughter’s life, but not now.

Now, she was ours.





70


low


I don’t like to say that the Hawking police were stupid, but they were stupid. They were so fixated on Max, on his fight with Freya, and on searching the main house, that they barely inspected the studio. They walked through it, climbed up into the attic, and opened the kiln. When they found it empty but for a tiny pile of ash, they closed the lid and walked away. They may have known that a cremation oven leaves approximately one cubic inch of ash per pound of body (I knew this because Freya had been commissioned to make an urn a few months back). But they didn’t know that incinerating a person at significantly higher temperature reduces that residue. And if they had sifted through the fine dust that once was Freya, they would have found it: a small misshapen disk the size of a large thumb print. It was an alloy of copper and lead, melted and then hardened. It was the bullet that had been buried in her heart.

It was the only souvenir I kept of the woman I’d loved so fiercely. Her phone and her rings were at the bottom of the Pacific, along with the gun and the shell casing. I’d taken Vik’s aluminum fishing boat out for the afternoon and jettisoned the evidence off the side. (No one thought my trip was unusual. Before Freya, I used to spend hours alone on the water under the auspices of fishing.) I burned the sex photos of Freya and Max, and then I laid low for a couple of weeks, photographing my siblings, enthusiastically eating my mother’s dal, acting normal. When I knew that no one could ever link me to Freya’s disappearance, I returned to the scene of the crime.

The for sale sign was already planted on the verge as I pulled into the driveway. Max was in the garage, packing up his boating gear, but he emerged when he heard my vehicle.

“You’re leaving,” I said, as I got out of my truck.

“Yep. The police cleared me. Did they talk to you?”

“For about five minutes. They wanted to know about Freya’s ‘state of mind.’ ”

Max nodded. It was clear to everyone that she’d been suicidal. “I’m going back to the Yukon,” he said.

“And Maggie?”

“She’s with Brian and Jamie. They’re her parents, now. She’ll be better off.”

I nodded my agreement.

We were both taciturn types, so there was a long tense silence while thoughts raced through my mind. Max had been unconscious when I shot Freya; he couldn’t know that I had killed her to save his daughter. Unless . . . somewhere in his injured brain, he had heard the gun go off. Unless, his sightless eyes had flickered open and witnessed what I had done. Did he know that I had considered, however briefly, incinerating his body, and running off with his wife?